High Schoolers Coding in NYC’s AFSE

Over the course of the past 3 months I’ve had the opportunity to visit NYC’s Academy for Software Engineering a few times. AFSE is a “high school for the design and development of software and applications”. The school’s curriculum is largely comprised of the standard high school courses. But AFSE differs in one major way – the main focus is on teaching students how to code. Walking through the hallways, you can see inspirational postings at every step: there are photos of people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Marissa Mayer, and several signs that say:

C reate Solutions
O ptimize Opportunities
D eliver on your word
E xecute the plan

In fact, every teacher wears a hoodie (the techie “uniform”) with the same text written on the back. You can sense there is a certain pride in this approach here.

During one of my visits there, I volunteered to be a judge in the high school’s first-ever hackathon. The entire school participated in the event, and you could feel the excitement in every classroom. The theme was “Education”. The students were asked to build something that teaches their peers about a subject. And they did! From topics like history, biology, basketball and even Mario Kart, the students built fun and inspiring projects. Deciding on my favorite project was not an easy task. To make the entire event even more special, Fred Wilson, the famed VC and founder of the school, was there to deliver the winners’ prizes.

AFSE makes me think back to my own experience in a Computer Science and Programming high school when Pascal was still in vogue and social networks hadn’t been invented yet. But today’s high school students work on projects that I could have only dreamed of when I was 14: at AFSE, they use MIT’s Scratch, which teaches coding by using a drag and drop interface. Students can quickly build interactive animations, take input from the user, and at the end share their project with the rest of the Scratch community.

I believe more than ever in the future where students learn to code as part of their core curriculum.  It’s only a matter of time before more schools realize how critical this is to a student’s success. Whatever profession they choose, these students will always have the advantage of CODE.